Saturday, July 09, 2005

ROBOTS take over the art world!

Just the other day I said that I am sick of live human art. I have seen a lot of art and I think that the world is ready for robots to make all the art! Ok, well I guess that humans still need to make the robots but one day we have a robot run world! Check out this exhibit: ArtBots is an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots.

WATSCHENDISKURS

Frank Fietzek & Uli WintersCat, Frog, controller, servo-motors, PC, pitch-bended soundfiles of recorded statements about language theory. (2004) Words are one of the most powerful and at the same time one of the most feeble means of interaction. Being strictly human they are an exclusive privilege of mankind. Yet it is plain to see that words often create the problems they are supposed to solve in the first place. You can talk about everything which is at the same time very frightening and fascinating as it includes failure: You can also misunderstand anything and that can evoke various unpleasant effects from silly discussions up to world war III.

The two puppets of WATSCHENDISKURS ("Face-slapping discourse") are involved in a discussion about language theory. Like in many a real life discussion they pick their phrases randomly from a pool of more or less witty statements on the topic of language including Wittgenstein-Quotes and Russian weather proverbs. From time to time this discussion gets pretty emotional, and at a point where words no longer seem to be the right tool of convincing the other one, the frog and the cat lose their temper. A slap in the face stops the opponent and gives way for another intellectual excursus about the different layers of speech.

This kind of intellectual body talk underlines the importance of the discussion that strangely enough seems to make sense, no matter in which combination the phrases are picked.

Shut up and listen!

Two Puppets, controlled by microcontrolers, connected to a Director-program that randomly gives them phrases to speak and decides when one of them stops the other one by physical servo force.